Who is the new CEO of Amazon after Bezos?

Summary

• Andy Jassy, who has spent 24 years at Amazon, will be Jeff Bezos successor.
• Before stepping into Bezos’ shoes, Jassy was the CEO of Amazon Web Services.

US multinational technology and e-commerce giant Amazon recently got a new CEO. Andy Jassy will take over as the new CEO after Bezos declared that he would look into new projects. Before stepping into present CEO’s shoes, Jassy was the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Jassy, 53, has been with Amazon for 24 years and was instrumental in framing the guiding principles for Amazon, thereby bringing about the data-driven culture in the company.

The journey so far

In 1997, Andy Jassy joined Amazon as a market manager and started his career journey, after completing his MBA from the Harvard Business School. In a very early phase of his career, he became a project manager at MBI. Jassy was considered as an asset by the company from his early days as he motivated the company to look beyond just book sales, and he served as a technical assistant for Bezos in early 2000s. The seeds for his career growth were sown at Bezos house in Seattle in 2003, where he was a part of one of the interdepartmental brainstorming sessions. It was Jassy who gave the idea of selling the additional created capacity of cloud computing to other companies so that they could run their IT operations on the online systems of Amazon.

Bezos gave him the approval and thus the journey of Amazon becoming a cloud computing giant started. Jassy became the founder and CEO of AWS (Amazon Web Services), and this played a key role in his success, as he transformed Amazon from just an e-commerce company to a leading cloud computing company. AWS holds approximately 45% of the market, even though it was followed by big companies like Microsoft and Google giving it competition by offering similar IT services. In 2020, 63% of the entire earnings of Amazon came from the $13.5 billion dollar profit from AWS. The joke on the Wall Street about Jassy was actually true, that he already ran Amazon even before becoming the CEO!

Challenges then and now

One of the biggest challenges Jassy has ever faced in his career was losing the Pentagon cloud contract worth $10 billion to Microsoft. Following which, Amazon filed a lawsuit challenging the decision and blamed former US president Donald Trump for exerting pressure on the Pentagon officials to award the contract to the Microsoft. Amazon cited a 2019 book which highlighted how Trump had asked the Defense Department to throw Amazon out of the JEDI contract race.

In the present times, while Jassy will be looking after Amazon’s operations worth US $40 billion across the world, Bezos is scheduled to take role of the executive chairman and focus on new projects.

Lately, Amazon has been facing various controversies and problems with customers, tax authorities, as well as competition regulators. The traditional retailers, who have been paying higher local taxes, have stood up against the company as their livelihoods are being negatively impacted. The Amazon platform has been attacked in the EU for allegedly encouraging the sales of its own products through unfair means, at the cost of other sellers on the platform, except for the sellers who use the logistics and delivery services provided by Amazon itself. Recently, the company has been accused of not taking enough measures to avert the fake reviews on its website, which influence the customer preferences as many of them buy products based on ratings and reviews. Under the presidency of Joe Biden, Jassy may have to deal with more regulations than what Bezos had to face under the Trump presidency. Democrats in the US already have reservations about the actions of big tech companies. How Jassy will tackle these challenges in the future is yet to be seen.

Amazon has been characterised as a reserved and uncommunicative member in the London tech group. There are various conferences and debates that regularly take place in London to build and evaluate the local industry picture, with the valuable contribution of all the Silicon Valley giants. As per Russ Shaw, founder of TechLondon Advocates, Amazon has shown little interest with very low engagement in London. It is also said that the management of the company may not be so keen on London due to the European tax domicile.